Hah! Caught you in the sunlight Lake Benanee! Enjoy some of the more beautiful photos taken by the ample supply of grey nomad photographers here. Lake Benanee was an important place and resource for Aboriginal people in the past – it was a burial ground, it was a place of conflict between Aboriginal people and Major Mitchell and Aboriginal objects from this location have made their way into collections across Australia.

The roads (and planes) in my life often lead to Mildura on the banks of the Murray River. Population of around 30,000. Award winning vanilla slices, an excellent Thai restaurant, one of the many stomping grounds of Big Lizzie, riverboats, wine and all the amenities one needs to set out on an adventure to the Murray/Murrumbidgee/Darling Rivers wonderland. In a July visit this year, I visited the Rio Vista Homestead, once the home of the Chaffey Brothers and now a regional art gallery and museum. I learnt interesting things about irrigation, took in some art and then nursed a cup of tea as I read Mildura Living and eavesdropped on other people’s conversations.

The day I stood at the boundary marker of South Australia and New South Wales, ate a mandarin and exchanged sarcastic comments with a pretty awesome German PhD candidate who had been busy drilling holes in the Murrumbidgee to date it. Worse ways to spend a day.

Beaut lunch at Kulcurna Station, currently owned by the Hansens. Goat stew, golden syrup dumpling, river gums, the red cliffs of the Murray River. Back in the day, one of the homestead owners developed drought resistant strains of wheat and put crops in the bed of the river during times of drought (Hansen 2010, Postcards SA). Sadly my camera died so no photos but you can check out Kulcurna’s blog or their photo gallery or a Kulcurna postcard or sunphio’s Kulcurna flickr album

One of the stops on our tour of the Murray River was Moorna Station. The Moorna Homestead on the station was constructed in 1869 on the Murray River by William Crozer, near to the remains of Moorna town which was once the administrative centre of the Wentworth Shire and an important paddleboat wharf in the 1850s. Today it is a working property owned and managed by Annabel Walsh, a member of the Australian Rangeland Society, whose passion for land management has led to innovations in timed grazing, improving carbon content in soils and taken her to countries such as Mongolia to promote healthy rangelands. To see more pictures of life on Moorna Station, visit the Land and to read more about the significance of the Moorna homestead and the history Wentworth Shire, visit the Wentworth Shire Council.

Lake Victoria, downstream of the Murray-Darling river junction in New South Wales, fed by Frenchman’s Creek, an anabranch of the Murray River, flows into the Rufus River. The Lake became regulated in 1928 and is now operated by the South Australia Water Corporation on behalf of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. The lake retained water over the last 10,000 years at a time when many of the inland lakes were drying up in this arid region.It provided an off river storage and is used to store surplus water which can then be used to regulate the flow of water into South Australia and to manage salinity. The Lake is significant as it, its lunette and the surrounding creeks and rivers, hold an important cultural and archaeological record of the last 16,000 years of human occupation, from shell middens dating to 17,000 BP to the history of the Rufus River massacre of 1841 to the Barkindji people’s continuing connection to the lake. The archaeological record includes an enormous number of Aboriginal burials, shell middens, campsites and stone artefacts. Many sites have been inundated by the water storage and work is ongoing by the Murray Darling Basin Commission and the Aboriginal community to preserve and repatriate burials when they become exposed. TheDepartment of Environment provides a leaping off point to explore more about indigenous involvement in the management of Lake Victoria.